Rumania Charged with Persecuting Jews; United States Seeks International Action

The New York Post correspondent here today reported, on the basis of a “confidential report,” that “Communist persecution of the 400,000 Jews of Rumania…has reached a savage intensity in which not even the aged and children are spared.” The correspondent added that “the facts in the report account for a U.S. decision to place the case of Rumania’s Jews and the Protestant and Catholic clergy in Bulgaria and Hungary before the International Court of Justice.

The report quoted by the Post says that some 320,000 Jews–80 percent of the total Jewish population–have been deprived of all means of earning a living, have been reduced to selling personal possessions and, when these are gone, face starvation. It also charges that Rumanian prisons are filled with Jews–most of whom are Zionists–and that many Orthodox Jews have been jailed for attempting to flee the country. All efforts to convince the Rumanian authorities to permit such Jews to leave for Israel have proven unsuccessful, the report states.

It also asserts that many of the 100,000 laborers on a proposed Rumanian canal from the Danube to the Black Sea are Jews recruited through forced labor. Finally, the report says that Rumanian police attempted to force Jewish orphaned children to leave Orthodox children’s homes to live with Communist families, but that the children in most cases fled the new homes and have been hidden by the Jewish community.